Not even if they noticed its presence, which many people—too enmeshed in their own thoughts, their own concerns—did not. Not even when it was pointed out to them by, say, a longtime teacher who wanted his ninth graders to pass their end-of-year English proficiency test, and also wanted them to take pleasure in the way simple words could contain multitudes. Universes secreted away, but open to explorers with sufficient curiosity and persistence.
Even those whocoulddecipher subtext didn’t always wish to perform the labor. He hadn’t required a teaching degree for that revelation. A decade of joyous, sometimes-contentious married life had clarified the matter sufficiently.
Yes, subtext was difficult. Fraught. No question about it.
Still. Since that first faculty meeting, he’d been amazed. Nay, stupefied.
People seemed to think Candy Albright was as straightforward and direct as her pronouncements, as if she possessed no subtext at all. No river running swift and hidden beneath the craggy, immovable, desert-dry boulders of her words.
Worse: No one, as far as he could tell, seemed to wonder about context either, or consider the simplest and most obvious question. The question he trained his ninth graders to ask over the course of a school year together.
Those times when he couldn’t successfully occupy himself with other matters—times like these—he did wonder. He did consider. He asked himselfwhy.
Why her students claimed to fear her, yet seemed entirely certain she would spend hours after the last bell working with them on their college application essays. Which she did. He’d seen her night after night, bent over a desk, red pen in hand, attention sharp as the tacks studding her bulletin board on the students and papers before her.
Why, when she worried and grew exasperated, she borrowed the words of mobsters instead of poets and threatened—unconvincingly—to put hits on those causing her distress. She, an English teacher of considerable repute, who guided her seniors inexorably through poetry and prose and the vagaries of the AP English Literature and Composition exam.
Why a woman, so often humorless as a dirge, had a laugh as loud and honking and unabashed as hers. A cascade of sound, its joyful draw undeniable. Though he had done his best to deny it anyway.
Why a woman so brash and unafraid and amusinglycertain—a tidal wave in human form, aforce—had arrived weeks early to set up her classroom, face grey and wan. Hair shorn, also greyer than the previous year. So quiet. Too quiet. Even before her injury.
Why, in short, Candy Albright was Candy Albright. The cocksure Candy Albright of last year, and the bafflingly diffident Candy Albright of today.
He shouldn’t wonder, of course. It didn’t speak well of him that he did. Or rather,howhe did, with fascination and anxiety and something like urgency.
He wondered anyway.
Finally, once the bedside clock ticked past two in the morning, he punched his pillow, turned on his side, and forced his eyes shut.
This preoccupation—this foolish, damnable fascination with Candy—was a mere academic exercise, the allure of a puzzle yet to be solved. At most, the automatic, perfunctory concern of a coworker. Nothing more than that.
Please God, nothing more than that.
Two
“Why green?”Griff asked in lieu of all the more important, more dangerous questions.
When Candy didn’t answer right away, he held a letter against the paper-covered cork, using a level to ensure its straightness and a ruler to keep the spacing between letters even. With an emphatic bang, she stapled the last piece of the Jean Rhys quotation into place. Then she placed the stapler on the counter and gazed at the newly completed bulletin board as he climbed down from the stepstool.
Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere. An assertion he both appreciated and seconded, naturally, although its selection was somehow… softer than he’d expected from his colleague. More openly sentimental.
With a quiet sigh, she removed her glasses and let them hang around her neck. Rubbed her eyes as he watched, struck by the sight of her without that barrier in place.
“Candy? Why green?” he repeated.
When she turned her head toward him, he could spot the thready lines and shadows underneath those sharp eyes, the way her brown eyelashes stood almost straight out instead of curling coquettishly. Defensive spikes, not an open fan.
A stray eyelash now rested above her round cheek, but he kept his hands to himself.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She donned those horn-rimmed glasses once again and retreated behind her desk. “My bulletin board is blue.”
Now he was even more intrigued. Deliberate obtuseness was not Candy’s usual modus operandi. “So it is. Which is why I was referring to your cast, rather than your display.”
After their late-night emergency room visit, she hadn’t returned to school for the rest of the week. He’d fought against sending her an e-mail or concerned text every day. Every hour. But she’d arrived only minutes after him today, the following Monday, and his heart had uncramped a bit in his chest at the sound of her clomping footsteps in the hall, the sight of her rosy cheeks and tilted chin, even though she was wearing a t-shirt and stretchy pants again.
Apparently her swelling had diminished over the past week. Her lower left arm was now encased to the wrist in a forest-green fiberglass cast.
It seemed a curious choice for a woman who generally eschewed darker colors.
